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Comment by echopom | Hacker News Reader

> What is the recommended course of action? Stop buying Intel products, and devices which contain them?

There is absolutely nothing to be done on our level about this.

I'm fairly convinced this is systemic issue that can only be solved by redesigning almost entirely modern cpus and computers architecture.

I can draw a parallel to approximately all Intel cpus which are know to have a dedicated "mini cpu" called "Minix" which is an absolute "black box" and have been found to be vulnerable for to a wide variety of attack for nearly decades...

Not only we need to redesign computers and cpu architecture but we desperately need to make that entire process and knowledge open source , available to all and more transparent.

Today this entire knowledge is the hand of few gigantic corps whom are keeping it to ensure their monopolistic position.

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> Not only we need to redesign computers and cpu architecture but we desperately need to make that entire process and knowledge open source , available to all and more transparent.

Here's hoping OpenRISC takes off!

HN has a broad audience.

What exactly is "our level"?

Me being a caveman who believes that technology is a hammer that still can be used to drive nails into building materials instead of our own heads, I'm longing for an Intermesh of simple networked 8-bit machines running on vanilla (no ARM core bonuses) FPGAs, with CPUs simple enough to be predictable and understood not by a select few superhumans in the world, but by a critical mass of people, and communication protocols built from scratch with privacy and security in mind, so that such device could represent a social node: here's some info that I chose to make public, and there's my protected data. A single pedestrian FPGA could host a swarm of such tiny CPUs, each dedicated to a single task or security domain: a CPU to talk to shared filesystem, a CPU to talk to the private one, one more to process input, one to Tx/Rx bytes over the wire etc..

Or, if that is too complex, there could just be a bunch of breadboarded ICs capable of networking. There actually are real-world examples of such machines exposed via telnet, e.g. http://www.homebrewcpu.com

And all the performance beasts, while surely indispensable, could just enjoy their air-gapped solitude. Are there any massively parallel supercomputing tasks whose results couldn't be summarized and reduced to mere text, which is not too hard to move over the airgap manually?

> Are there any massively parallel supercomputing tasks whose results couldn't be summarized and reduced to mere text, which is not too hard to move over the airgap manually?

Video decoding? Games? You know, the major use cases for custom highly patented hardware design?

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